Customize the data that LTP is going to fetch with pre-filters like “Suggested Bid” (or Cost per Click [CPC], i.e. the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on their AdWords ad that is targeting that specific keyword), “Local Search Volume” (average number of monthly searches for a specific keyword), “Advertiser Competition” (the amount of advertisers competing for a specific keyword) and “Number (of) Words” (very important when you’re trying to find long-tail keywords).
Wordtracker is another service that requires an annual subscription to utilize all of its features. Their database is made up of 330 million search terms, collected from the major metacrawlers, Dogpile and Metacrawler, and is updated weekly. The search data they show is a record of the number of times the exact keyword or phrase has been searched in the United States over the last 365 days. As in the case of Keyword Discovery, this difference in default keyword matching type causes Wordtracker to display search volumes significantly lower than what Google’s tools show.
They’ll show you information like how many external links the site has, the number of Facebook and Google+ shares, estimated visits per month, and its page authority. All of this is valuable intel that can give you insight into where your page could potentially rank against them, without needing to do more research with a separate tool or on another page.
You don’t really need to worry about the volume size either. Too big a number just means you will have to work harder to get ranked in Google. It’s now quite commonplace to see SEO people say it’s best to just go with your gut feeling on a keyword. Just go for something you would type into Google search yourself instead of beating yourself up trying to find that ‘one’ killer keyword.
I just downloaded a free version of LTP 3.1.0 and I cannot figure out why I can’t see the table headers of ‘Page Authority’, ‘Domain Authority’, ‘Juice Links’, etc next to ‘Keyword Competitiveness’. Normally, I should be able to see these but instead I see new categories like ‘Trust Flow’, ‘Citation Flow’, ‘Domain CF’, ‘Domain TF’ and so on. I thought I can still use the regular version of LTP for 10 day trial so I am not sure why I see different categories. Is it b/c I am on version 3.1.0 instead of 3.0? Let me know if you have any idea.Thanks!

Trying to rank for the keyword “Best Headphones” will see your post, page, or article buried in the depths of a billion search engine pages, and it’s never going to surface in the top thousand pages, let alone page one…ever! But going for a keyword, or Long Tail keyword phrase “What are the Best Headphones for Sleeping” will stand you in better shape to get somewhere close, or even on, the first page.

"Our whole team has a copy of Keyword Researcher, we use it for everyone of our client's keyword research for the 'Long Tail' and we use it every day to come up with blog post ideas and ideas for guest posting. We couldn't live without this tool. I have used every paid keyword research tool under the sun, and this by far is my favorite tool for mining the Long Tail."
Keyword Researcher is an easy-to-use Keyword Discover Tool. Once activated, it emulates a human using Google Autocomplete, and repeatedly types thousands of queries into Google. Each time a partial phrase is entered, Google tries to predict what it thinks the whole phrase might be. We simply save this prediction. And, as it turns out, when you do this for every letter of the alphabet (A-Z), then you're left with hundreds of great Long Tail keyword phrases.
Most keyowrd databases consist of a small sample of the overall search universe. This means keyword databases tend to skew more toward commercial terms and the core/head industry terms, with slighlty less coverage of the midtail terms. Many rarely searched for longtail terms are not covered due to database size limitations & lack of commercial data around those terms. Plus if those terms were covered, there would be large sampling errors. Google generates over 2 trillion searches per year and claims 15% of their searches are unique. This means they generate searches for over 300 billion unique keywords each year. The good news about limited tail coverage is it means most any keyword we return data on is a keyword with some commercial value to it. And with Google's Rankbrain algorithm, if you rank well on core industry terms then your pages will often tend to rank well for other related tail keywords.
We prefer and suggest Long Tail Pro to all our clients. Long Tail Pro is the best long tail keyword research software online. I use their software for researching keywords for everything from social media marketing bios, to page and blog post titles, to headings (H2, H3, etc.), to meta descriptions, to YouTube descriptions, to content/articles, and so much more!
This tool allows you to type in your keyword phrase or keyword in the field that is provided and it will generate a long list of suggested keywords. It has three button level and you can perform a deeper search by clicking on button level 2. You will get a list of keywords or keyword phrases that are related to the original list provided in level one. If you want to continue further, you can click on level three and then click the link at the bottom to download the data. The tool can assist you to discover those keywords that your competitors could be ignoring and use those opportunities to create fresh targeted content.

These are usually single-word keywords with insane amounts of search volume and competition (for example, “insurance” or “vitamins”). Because searcher intent is all over the place (someone searching for “insurance” might be looking for a car insurance quote, a list of life insurance companies or a definition of the word), Head Terms usually don’t convert very well.

Trying to rank for the keyword “Best Headphones” will see your post, page, or article buried in the depths of a billion search engine pages, and it’s never going to surface in the top thousand pages, let alone page one…ever! But going for a keyword, or Long Tail keyword phrase “What are the Best Headphones for Sleeping” will stand you in better shape to get somewhere close, or even on, the first page.
Great article again. I was just thinking why can’t I find an article of yours on keyword research and then boom here it is. Thanks again. On another subject are your articles on link building still relevant ?. As I have been guilty of as Brian Deane calls it the publish and pray method. I would really like to know what is method of choice for link building. Thanks again Ian.
This is a rather crude metric because it presumes one can monetize all the traffic they receive AND one can generate as much profit per visitor as Google does. Anyone who could do both of those would likely displace Google as the first consumer destination in their market (like how many people in the United States start ecommerce searches on Amazon.com rather than Google.com).
How do I access my download for Long Tail Pro after I purchase? There actually IS NOT a download available for Long Tail Pro anymore – now that they switched over to a cloud-based platform! No more software download means that you can use your Long Tail Pro subscription from any web browser anywhere! Just watch your email inbox for the email address you used when you made the purchase. All instructions will be sent there. Make sure you put those initial emails in a Save folder so you can access them later if you need to.
Joost developed his own keyword research tool to come up with keywords as well! Yoast Suggests uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from searching in Google. It finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then requests more of them. So if you type ‘example‘, it’ll also give you the expansions for ‘example a…’ till ‘example z…’ etc. Just go on and try it and fill out some of your potential keywords. It’s a great way to quickly find more long tail keywords you can focus on.

To answer your final question, yes but not really. You can definitely use AdWord keyword planner tool to get solid organic search volume estimates. However, don’t just stop there. Leverage other tools to find longer tail variations you can map against various stages of the buyer journey. I like to use SEMrush, Keyword Tool.io and Google autosuggest.

2) Software project no 2 – invite your readers to participate and select 2-5 that will enter a mastermind group with you – and let the readers follow the progress – from brainstorming to hiring a coder, to beta testing, to “how to reach out to get sales” (I know you wrote a post on this – but would be great to tag along). And then those that are not part of the Mastermind group could be added to a forum/FB group and can then follow along and develop and ask each other for help.